Palin into omnipotence

COMMENT
Asia Times February 10, 2010
By Ian Williams

WASHINGTON - "We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron," declaimed American journalist H L Mencken (1880-1956) many years ago: former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's speech to the National Tea Party movement in Tennessee last weekend calls the famous curmudgeon's lofty aspiration to mind.

Certainly, the "plain folks" assembled there fitted Mencken's bill, and they enthusiastically assume that Palin is one of them. The convention included "birthers" who think that President Barack Obama is a Muslim alien, many who think the United Nations is a sinister internationalist plot, and platform speakers who think that



the president is not just a socialist, but an "international socialist", which does not betoken an esoteric appreciation of the detritus of the fourth international, but is simply two conservative swear words compounding each other.

Palin might on occasion be an ignoramus, but she is no moron, and what is more, she is making money hand over fist, which is more than they are. In fact, they paid over their hard-earned dollars to attend the convention, which a for-profit company arranged, and which paid Palin a US$100,000 speaker's fee.

Her rhetoric avoids endorsement of the wilder excesses of her supporters, yet her folksy delivery and anarchic syntax is close enough in spirit for them to identify with her. If she did articulate her policies in a clear and intellectually compelling way, she would lose their support, as in fact former presidential candidate John McCain has done with occasional, albeit infrequent, public displays of cerebral activity. Horrified at his temerity in letting reality intrude on the smooth flow of their venomous prejudices, some in the Tea Party are against him in the next primary.

Insofar as is there is a movement, it is fueled by a rage that depends for its strength and cohesion on its inarticulacy. Yes, there is also a deep racist undercurrent - in fact often quite explicit. There are a lot of whites who still can't cope with a black president - which is why some of them can't believe he is a citizen. It is progress of sorts that they don't come out and say clearly why he cannot be president, but it is noticeable that the conventions and demonstrations are whiter than a supermarket sliced loaf.

However, there are more rational premises for their anger, even if the conclusions they draw from them are far-fetched, indeed far-stretched. Working-class (or in US parlance middle-class) incomes have been stagnant for decades, since president Ronald Reagan in fact, while health and higher education costs have soared.

It is a year since Obama picked up the poisoned chalice from George W Bush and was left to pick up the ruins of the neo-liberal enterprise. There is little doubt that his efforts have stopped it being even worse, but after a year in which he has, in effect, pandered to the perpetrators in the name of bipartisanship, it almost presents his back with a large target.

But Obama has not shown the leadership he should have done, whether on oversight of banks or reform of healthcare, and his main fault is that he has left it to the congressional Democrats, many of whom have been as subservient to the business lobbyists as their Republican opponents.

Palin's flip comment on Obama strikes memorably home at his failure, which is no less a real political failure, even though neither she nor the Republicans have any alternative plans at all, "So, how's that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?"

Obama has gone technocratic on his erstwhile supporters, and backpedaled on charismatic clear leadership while not putting a clear enough line between him and his predecessor. Certainly, the direction and tone of government has changed, immeasurably for the better under Obama, although you would never guess that from listening to the leftist mirror images of the teabaggers who accuse the president of betraying principles that he never espoused. But even if he did not promise the revolutionary changes that some of them imagined, he did, both explicitly and implicitly, promise change in how business would be conducted in Washington.

One lesson that some have drawn from the surprise Republican victory in Massachusetts is that the teabaggers rule and that conservative rage is triumphant. But polls show that no less than 82% of those who deserted Obama and voted for the Republican candidate wanted a public option in the healthcare bill. Similarly, large majorities of voters in all parties disagree strongly with the Supreme Court decision that now allows corporations unlimited spending in elections.

We cynics, looking at how much influence business already has in Washington, are not sure that it could get any worse. But the entirely rational fear of big business and big government is the basis of disaffection from left to right. The genius of Palin and the Republican right is to tie these in a package with "Big Labor" and present it as creeping socialism, along with undercover anti-minority and anti-black sentiment, in a way that attracts such dedicated and vociferous support. It has been done before. Think of the brownshirts, until they had served their purpose.

On the one hand, the teabaggers might make the Republicans unelectable nationally - soon, for example, the minorities will be a majority! And the electorate as a whole still shows signs of awareness of the real world. But Obama and the Democrats need some more therapeutic and constructive anger to retain traditional supporters and win new ones.

Ironically, the Supreme Court decision, even if does not inaugurate the cataclysmic consequences that some fear, could be the fulcrum for a major campaign to change how Washington does business, to question what most countries see as a system of overt corruption and bribery. But the president has to be indignant with his own side as well: he cannot allow the congressional leaders of his party to frame legislation, whether on health, financial oversight or Pentagon procurement, shaped by the campaign donations the most self-interested corporations and industries have given them.

Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.

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Palin-drone

That was not a debate, it was sequential TV interviews, and as
someone who has coached people in interview techniques, by slick
flack standards she aced it.

I have coached people for media interviews myself. Media trainers coach CEOs, bureaucrats,politicians, to bridge, to take the question and lead to the points
they want to make. Of course, if you have no points to make, the
discerning will note that it is a bridge to nowhere, which is what happened with Sarah Palin.

She is clearly a sharp operator, even though she lacks the
intellectual framework to absorb and use the factoids and FAQs that
her trainers had stuffed her with for the Couric interviews.

But then we come back to the original Palin-drone concep -she was
picked for comfort, not for speed. Her soap opera vacuities and
platitudes, with the grins, winks and small town tropes, "maverick," "outsider,"
"hockey moms," will work with lots of people who would be bewildered
with details of policy. Shame her AIPAC trainers who were on her case
did not get her to pronounce Isreeeal properly - and you may remember
her speech writers knowing Bush had spelled out Newclear for her
convention speech.

Like I said the first time..this election is an IQ test, and I am
pleased to note the US electorate shows signs of passing.

It's a shame Biden and her kissed on Israel and Iran... ominous. Biden failed to make the point that the reason Bush failed on the peace process was his total unwillingness to pressure Israel in anyway to make the concessions to legality and diplomacy needed. Although he is more aware of them than her, Biden showed no signs of offering an alternative. The last people who did were Baker and Bush Snr, who were right, but paid the price. Let's hope, if they are elected Obama and Biden will do the necessary. But they should be encouraged by criticising them now for their pandering.

Beyond the Palin
It's revealing that George Bush and Dick Cheney didn't get mentioned by the VP nominee in her big speech last night


Ian Williams
guardian.co.uk, Thursday September 04 2008 19:00 BST

If Obama's convention speech, with the white columns in the huge stadium was grand opera, Sarah Palin's was soap opera. The message was not that we should overlook her inexperience, but rejoice in it. We should vote for her because she was a hockey mom. The content of her speech was dumbed down in a way that was exquisitely handcrafted.

In the hall, the audience was festooned with folksy placards handcrafted by the same sophisticated but ultimately stupid whiz-kids who put the Mission Accomplished banner on the USS Lincoln five long years ago. The crowd is different, however. At a Republican convention there is always an undercurrent of bitterness and anger, a readiness to boo at the mention of, for example, community organising, or Senate democratic majority leader Harry Reid, or chant "Drill baby, drill", as the crowd offers to drive their gas-guzzlers over all obstacles.

Of course, the crowd had been primed for bitterness by none other than New York's own Napoleon, the bitter and vicious Rudy Giuliani who always gives the impression of payback time for perennial bullying in his schoolboy days. However, any crowd that cheers Giuliani for celebrating McCain's response to Putin's Cossack raid into Georgia, "We are all Georgians," is not up for cerebration. Whose big talking got the Georgians into that predicament? And is McCain in a refugee camp with Russian tanks stopping him move about his own country?

Technically, Palin's speech was not a patch on Obama's. I ran it past the reading level test on the spell checker. His had come in at a reading level of fourth grade, with no passives. Hers was a reading level of over ninth grade with six per cent of passives. Strangely, although she was clearly intended to evoke the solidarity votes of small town America, her speech writers, Bush's hand-me-downs, were worried about her pronunciation, and spelt out some difficult words for her on the teleprompter: "habber-dasher" for haberdasher, "new-clear" for nuclear to avert the Bushian "noocoolear."

However, even if the style was higher than Obama's, the content was not. It was aimed at people of faith, who could believe in three impossible things before breakfast. Her speechwriter Matthew Scully wrote a book about the ethical treatment of animals, which is perhaps why his residual ethics eschewed any mention of shooting wolves from aircraft that may have sullied the hockey mum image. Nor indeed did he mention that her enthusiasm for hockey led her to increase the local sales tax – including on food – to build an ice-hockey stadium so that her son could indulge his passion closer to home.

The speech was almost certainly inspired by HL Mencken's thought: "On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron". But that is unfair. Both she and her speechwriters are very clever, and unscrupulous, and they want to make her fit that role. They are basing their campaign on the premise that the American electorate wants a president on the edge of Alzheimer's and a vice-president who is auditioning for a part in a schmaltzy soap opera.

She mentioned, to cheers that her husband was a proud member of the United Steelworkers Union, she glided over pathological Republican attempts to crush unions, and inhibit their organising efforts. But then, nor did she mention her run-in with the town librarian (surely along with the little red school house, an American icon) over censorship, her attempts to promote creationism, her belief that God wants federal funding for Alaskan pipelines, her doubts about global warming, or her pursuit of personal family feuds against public employees. This is a serious omission, and almost perplexing since it could prove that she may indeed be a worthy successor to Dick Cheney as a vice-president, and indeed a better shot, hitting wolves rather than colleagues. But then, Cheney wasn't mentioned either.

Her balancing budgets may have been helped by a $1,000 per head per annum pork-barrelling operation from federal funds for her small town, helped by Senator Ted Stevens, one of the "good ol' boys" she was supposed to have cleaned out, but who is currently campaigning for re-election even as he faces Federal corruption charges.

She complained that Obama did not mention victory. But if pressed, she might have to explain why diverting troops from the search for Bin Laden in Afghanistan to Iraq and bogging down in both places occasioned mention for victory. Almost as eloquent in the deafening sound of silence was any reference to President Bush, which is surely churlish. The USA has had eight years of the policies she was prescribing – and is teetering on the edge of an economic catastrophe, but she just ignored it.

Polls suggest that the American public oppose almost every one of Palin's concealed policies. This speech casts the forthcoming telection as an IQ test for the American electorate. If it fails, I foresee long lines outside Canadian and European consulates as the elite (anyone with an IQ over a 100) tries to get out.